reading a 2012 interview with Lewis Parker, and was interested by the following...

UKHH.COM: Tell me about something you do in production which you think is a Lewis Parker method, like something you always do to a sound or drums?

LP: There are many secret techniques, but there is one style known to certain producers called ‘THE TRICK’. This technique is the principle behind my main production method. It has to do with the maintaining of the natural air around a sound!

anyone know anything about this?

I think LP is an incredible beat maker so i'd really like to know more about it..

i really wouldn't worry about it. even if you knew said secret, i doubt it would be the difference between poor and great productions.

it's more important to develop your own personal sense of refined aesthetics, and whatever processes that might entail, rather than trying to understand anyone else's "secret methods", which are honestly a lot of nonsense.

He's talking about maintaining the original air or ambience around a sound so that is gonna have zero to do with processing.if its what i think it is i think it's that method of slicing things up where you loop the release tail or an open section with just the noisefloor etc and then re-envelope it so it decays again so you can rearrange the slices with them still sounding somewhat organic i.e not obviously sliced.you can hear this a lot on Dilla's stuff.it stops things sounding a bit choppy and fake.there's a thread somewhere on Dogsonacid as part of their Grid QandA with a proudcer named Paradox who goes into this method in quite some detail (DnB producer i know,but it's essentially the same skill set at a higher tempo)

yeah, this is the oldest sampling trick. when you chop a break or really any sample and have a slower tempo than the original, to fill in the spaces between drum hits you have your sampler play the sample forwards to the end, and then immediately reverse a tiny bit, which fills in the silence. this is actually the way Recycle works, though obviously it has limitations, where if it reverses too far it will definitely start sounding unnatural.. you only really want to reverse the very end of the sample that contains mostly the vinyl noisefloor.

a lot of the time with samples i just pitch **** down to compensate for slower BPM. if i need to then adjust pitch, i'll use the Waves Soundshifter, which has a lot less artifacts than most time-stretching does. it also makes it very simple to adjust pitch if your samples are already detuned to fit a BPM, as it has a box to change semi-tones and cents, which won't alter the sample's length. very easy.